During the very late 80s through the early 90s I had pretty much no interest in Dragon Quest / Dragon Warrior. I stuck with the Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy series.

But then in late '94 I was looking through Electronic Gaming Monthly, I came across a preview of Super Famicom Dragon Quest VI. It really got my interest because the battles were now animated and, not knowing anything at all about the trilogies & stories, read that VI was the final game in the Zenithia / Castle in the Sky trilogy. That appealed to me because the first Phantasy Star (which I adored) featured a celestial castle over the planet Palma where Lassic reigned over the Algol Star System. Very different than Dragon Quest for sure, yet I was for the first time really interested in a DQ game because of that. Anyway I lost the magazine eons ago. In recent times I wanted to see that DQVI preview again but had forgotten which issue of EGM it was in. I went to some lengths to find it. I pretty much had to guess what issue it was in and then *hope* to d/l the right issue.

Well I did, here it is (I guess these are beta screenshots):

That can be found in EGM issue 64 - November 1994, on page 86.

cover:

It would be almost a decade after this preview was published that I actually got to play DQVI, via emulation. Back in the early-mid 2000s there was a translation decent enough to start playing even ithough it wasn't complete or bug-free. Now of course things are much improved in that area from what I've read. I recently bought the DS remake--It's really nice, yet doesn't seem nearly as challenging as what I remember with Super Famicom version from what little I played of it. So I guess I'm going to have to go through both :)

You know, for all the times the series was mentioned in Nintendo Power back in the day, I never really got into or interested in the series until after playing VIII. Then again, I think that was because of the fact that we didn't get a DQ/DW after the hard to come by DW4 until DWVII on the PSX and that definitely wasn't the best entry to the series (especially when coupled with a volatile 3rd party memory card and a PoS PSX).

It always amuses me that the same thing also happened with the Fire Emblem series in that whatever mentions it got in NP or whatever interest I might have shown back in the day, I never really cared about the series until I finally got my hands on it in 2003 and was like "Holy shit! This is like FFT except even more brutal." and then I've been a fan of the SRPG genre ever since.

And to round it off, the Phantasy Star series was an oddball encounter for me due to the crash course I got on it with the GBA ports of 1-3. After managing to slog through the entirety of that, I managed to hunt down PSIV for the Genesis and gained a solid respekt for the series.

Obviously those screenshots are from an early beta since the sprites in the final SFC version look much better and more detailed.

The original DW got me interested in the Dragon Quest series being my first console RPG, though it would ironically be over a decade before I played another game in the franchise.

And by the looks of it Dragon Quest is headed towards a new dark age in North America since we're a ton of games behind Japan.

DQ has been in that dark age since IX had to be released out here by Nintendo. I'm still (kinda) bitter over NoA's localization teams having to choose DQVI over FEDS2 (though to be fair, I'm not that bitter as DQVI was ultimately the better remake; also, I'm even less bitter over NoA's localization teams choosing Bravely Default over DQVII).

I really liked this series in college though I started playing the DQ6 remake recently and I'm kind of wondering why I liked it in the first place.

It's like, this is my experience playing DQ6 -- I'm breaking it down into some kind of... tree structure, mentally, where I'm only presented with two choices at the same time, and the correct choice is either obvious or both choices are equally correct. I get to a town, I'm going to talk to every NPC, check every barrel, check the well, etc. Same thing. Whatever order I do this in is irrelevant -- the actual expansion is irrelevant -- because all nodes will be hit, no matter what arbitrary path between the nodes is taken.

This applies to dungeons and castles as well. The way you end up exploring them.

Combat breaks down into a simple attack-heal cycle with limited viable choices. You have class system, but there's a finite set of maximally useful party configurations for that, etc.

I don't know, I just don't think the passive, reactive, menu-driven gameplay inherent to the RPG genre is that engaging to me anymore. It just feels like going through the motions of doing something without actually doing anything.

Logged

o/` I do not feel joy o/`o/` I do not dream o/`o/` I only stare at the door and smoke o/`